This Is How You Die Page 3

  I took the newspaper to the kitchen, laid it out on the counter. I opened more of the envelopes, checking off the macabre sights inside against the pictures of the victims in the newspaper. One victim after another—this one’s throat had been slit; that one’s fingers and toes had been amputated; this man’s testicles had been removed; this woman’s scalp had been sliced off.

  It was a sordid collection of sickness, and one that I had taken great delight in reading about over the last few years. The thought had never crossed my mind that my own father had been the source. Even as I searched through his disturbing deeds, I found the idea hard to digest.

  The paper confirmed everything in the photos and with each collection came another prize. A lock of hair, neatly encased in laminate; folds of skin still clinging to hair follicles; a piece of skin, dried, preserved, and stored in multiple pieces of plastic wrap; a finger; a toe; a testicle.

  I dropped them back in the box and leaned against the counter, exhausted. I was breathing heavily, my eyes wide. As hard as it was to believe my father was a notorious serial killer, it was an invigorating discovery. I respected him for it. No more was he just a friendly, happy-go-lucky idiot who ran with the crowd and wanted to be a part of it. He was a vicious killer, a man who probably hated the world more than I did.

  But what did that mean? Why did I struggle to fit in and he didn’t? If anything, he should have had a harder time than I had. He had desires to murder, to mutilate, to destroy. He was a beast, a vicious demon who spent his days destroying life. How did he manage to fit in when all the while he—like me—was dreaming about ripping the throats of the very people he was befriending?

  Was he like me? Did he feel the way I did?

  I hovered back over the box. Alongside the envelopes were some floppy disks. I took these upstairs, making sure I locked the box first.

  I booted up my father’s computer. There was little of interest on there. A few card games, a puzzle game, a word processor. No files hidden in the open. I slid in one of the floppy disks. With my heart pounding in delightful anticipation and my hand trembling over the mouse, I opened up the most recent of two files.

  Eliza Rowntree. A pretty little thing, no more than eighteen. Popular, friendly, athletic. Stunning body. Amazing eyes. Perfect skin.

  I strangled her with my bare hands. The best way for her to go. I had to feel every inch of her depart. Watch the fear in her eyes and sense the stench of desperation on her breath.

  I took my time destroying her.

  I used a scalpel to carve out her eyes. So beautiful. I took a lock of her hair and a piece of her skin. She was my favorite victim.

  I couldn’t imagine my father writing what I had just read. It read like the diary of a madman, so succinct, so brutal. I read the second document; it was longer, more precise, detailing everything that Eliza did. Her weekly schedule, her daily routine. It even mentioned the dates of her menstrual cycle and when her parents usually visited. It was dated two months before the entry on her murder. Two months of methodical stalking before he had killed her.

  The other disks described other murders and other victims. It wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to know why my father had done it, why he had chosen his victims. I found a suggestion of what I was looking for on a disk created five years ago, around the time of the first Butcher murder.

  I wanted more. I didn’t get enough with him. It was gratifying, it was fun, but it could have been better.

  I hunted down my first female victim. A prostitute. Skinny. Probably a drug addict. Her lips were chafed. Eyes sunken. Despite her evident drawbacks, she was pretty. She would do.

  I took her to the woods. I suggested we get out of the car, as I didn’t want to mess up the interior with our bodily fluids. She didn’t object. She took off her knickers. Pinned herself nonchalantly up against a tree. Waited casually, chewing gum.

  I felt disgusted. She wasn’t even looking at me. Her pinpricked pupils were staring at everything but me, despite the fact that she was half naked and waiting for me to fuck her. I persevered nevertheless. I pinned her throat to the tree. She didn’t object at first, assuming I was just kinky. She was probably working out how much extra to charge me when the realization dawned.

  I closed my hand around her throat, so tight I could feel the gum slide down as she swallowed and prepared to scream. I clasped my free hand around her diseased lips. Squeezed until the blood drained from her face.

  With my free hand, I worked open my zipper. I was excited and eager, but my penis wasn’t. I left it dangling. Waiting.

  I ripped off her top, exposing an exquisite pair of breasts. Big, firm, smooth. I stared at them. Sunk my face into them. There was no movement. No erection.

  I thrust myself up against her, feeling her dry clitoris against the skin of my flaccid penis. A few pubic hairs, missed by the razor, brushed against my foreskin as I pumped myself back and forward.

  She screamed underneath the flesh of my palm. She bit my hand. I pulled it away in surprise and she freed herself. Kicking her heels into the undergrowth, disappearing into the forest.

  I followed her. Stalking around in the darkness, my pants still open, my eyes refusing to leave the grayness ahead of me. I enjoyed the chase. Striding through the fields. Avoiding the noisy leaves and twigs underfoot. Listening to the distant skips and stumbles as she struggled to run and hide.

  I reached a dead end. A wall of foliage. I pinned my ears to the air, heard her thick breaths, the perspiring sounds of an addict and a smoker. She was waiting behind a tree. Hiding. Petrified and breathless.

  I took her in my grasp for the second time. She was crying. Bawling her eyes out. Pleading and sobbing with every breath. I squeezed tighter and tighter until her eyes bulged. Her screams stopped. I used both of my hands to wring the life out of her like a wet towel.

  She slumped. Lifeless and breathless in the still night air.

  I was fully erect. I let her body drop. Eager for more.

  I dismissed the thought of having sex with her. She disgusted me as much dead as she did alive, but when I began to manipulate her body, I felt something I have never felt before. It was a fulfillment and an excitement topped only by squeezing the last dregs of life out of her.

  I finished her off with the tools in my boot. A pair of pliers for her bones. A scalpel for her flesh. I let the rain wash away the blood from my hands and face. It was reckless. It was risky. But it was fun. In the future, I will be more careful.

  Every killing had been documented. All twelve murders over the last five years, along with a few that hadn’t been attributed to The Butcher. I took great pleasure in reading about them, amazed that the image of The Butcher in my mind, an image created through years of avid reading and daydreaming, had now morphed into that of my father. It seemed illogical that he could have done such a thing, and yet he had.

  I finished reading the macabre material, packed everything back in the box, and buried it back in the garden. I kept the key for myself, depositing it in my underwear drawer.

  I didn’t know why my dad did what he did—why he started or why he continued—but it didn’t matter. He had done it. He had created a legend. He had created a God. Everyone feared him, everyone respected him, everyone revered him. And now what? Felled by something natural, something he couldn’t control … probably a heart attack, the cruelest and most primal of physiological failures. This wasn’t how great men died. It didn’t seem right. It wasn’t fair.

  The press anticipated his killings with giddy glee—each succession of slaughter another front page for their newspaper and another twenty-minute slot for their prime-time news show. Everyone awaited news of his next victim, every emaciated prostitute who had little choice but to stand on the streets and sell her body for a fix; every trembling teenager forced to walk home alone; every otherwise physically capable adult who imposed their company on others to avoid being alone.

  And now what? Their fear would grow, stagnate, and then, eventually, d
ie. The Butcher would retire to the pages of history. An interesting segment in a book of unsolved crimes. His legend, borne of fear, reverence, and spectacular brutality, would fade with an anti-climactic whimper.

  It was obvious what I had to do. I would like to say that I deliberated over it for a few days and maybe even suffered a series of sleepless nights. That would make sense, after all. But there was no deliberation, no sleepless nights. I had made my mind up before I had even realized the full extent of what my father had created.

  I had to take over. I had to continue my father’s legend. I had to become The Butcher.

  4

  Barry Barlow. One of the most feared and despised kids in my school. A friend and a brother-in-thuggish-arms to Darren Henderson, the bully who had tortured my educational existence since its lowly inception.

  He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. People said that he and Darren Henderson were two peas in a pod, but the truth was that Barry was as connected to Darren as a genital wart was to a sexually transmitted infection. He was the bum-fluff to his penis, the hangnail to his broken finger. But, as useless as he was, there was no denying that he and Darren were close, which was the first stumbling block I encountered when I decided to murder Darren Henderson.

  It was a no-brainer really. The Butcher had killed teenagers—albeit not exclusively—and he had killed within a few miles of the area. No one would bat an eyelid if Darren happened to be the next victim. It wasn’t strictly sensible of me to let my personal feelings get in the way of mine and my father’s legacy, but if this wasn’t personal, then what was it? I was planning to kill people and no one was paying me to do it. Of course it was fucking personal.

  As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t kill them both—that was a little too personal and would raise a few too many eyebrows. The Butcher hadn’t killed in pairs. The police would suspect a copycat on a mission of pure vendetta; it wouldn’t take them long to concentrate their suspicions on me.

  On my first day back after spring break, I followed Darren around like a hawk. His dimwitted friend didn’t leave his side. It was noteworthy but irrelevant, as I wasn’t going to kill him in school. At the end of the day, I jumped the bell and hid in a small group of trees on the boundaries of the playground. The school board had jumped on the green wagon and instructed all the first-graders to plant trees, hedges, and flowers around the school, saving the world one pointless piece at a time. The high schoolers used it for clandestine illegalities as they smoked, drank, and fucked their way through recess.

  There was no one there when I ducked inside and took up a position behind a low-hanging bush, where a used condom hung from a wilted leaf like snot from an infected nose.

  Darren and Barry also finished early, trundling out onto the grounds like giddy hyenas on the prowl for their prey. They glanced around, scanning the throng that inevitably followed the chime of the school bells. They spoke briefly, voicing their frustrations, and then they left.

  I waited for them to drift out of sight and then I set out after them, brushing painfully against a malignant thorny bush on the way. A few of the students gave me some perplexed glances as I emerged from the bushes. Their eyes darted past me to see if a female had also emerged, wondering who was desperate or dull enough to venture inside with me.

  I kept my distance from the pair, sidestepping behind bus shelters, walls, and gardens whenever possible, peering at them surreptitiously from around my makeshift blockades. They turned around once—Barry’s head inevitably following Darren’s—to scan the backside of a middle-aged woman who strutted past them with the firm, comfortable gait of a teenager and the attire of a cougar desperately clinging to a lost and promiscuous youth. They didn’t see me. Others did, giving me numerous inquisitive stares, but no one paid much attention. I was a nobody. To them I was weird and unimportant, even more so now that I was an orphan, and therefore I was probably always doing something suspicious and creepy.

  A mile or so down the road, they turned into a large subdivision—a succession of streets and houses that branched out from a central block of apartments like the diseased arms of a dying octopus. They walked down to the head of the octopus, bypassing a succession of pebble-dashed houses, and caught up with another pair of degenerates that had stopped to trade cigarettes, sweets, or something less innocuous opposite a garden that had been used as a Dumpster.

  I ducked into one of the gardens, through a gate that had had been ripped off its hinges and left on a small strip of yellowed grass. I hid up against a wall, pressing my face against the cold grainy musk of concrete and peeking around the corner. Darren and his friends were huddled in a conspicuous cluster, watching each others’ backs with the privacy and agitation of drug dealers.

  A loud, gruff shout dragged my attention away from the gaggle of cretins.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing!?”

  It came from the house to my left, belonging to the garden and boundary that I had casually crossed. A heavyset man, his beer belly jammed inside an undersized tank top, was glaring at me like I had stolen his dinner.

  My heart sank. He was only a few feet away, his body odor—an olfactory insult of cheap beer sweated through pores that hadn’t touched water for weeks—invading my nostrils. I recoiled and moved away from the wall, in plain sight of the idiots further along the road.

  I held up my hands defensively but they instinctively moved to my nose; his odor was too strong. “Jesus!” I spat as the smell hit me like a sweaty punch.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he roared.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled through a pinched nose. “It’s just, well, you fucking stink.”

  “What!?” I had been a few steps away, almost at the curb, but he waddled forward like a dropped Weeble. At any moment, I swore he would kick out a leg, lower his head, and charge.

  I stepped back, lost my balance over the curb, and stumbled into the road. I hit a parked car, righted myself after a collision with the hood, and then propelled myself off it with my forearms.

  There was a small dent where my forearms had collided with the hood, a concave puncture in the cheap metal. I neatly pressed the edge of the bubbled wound, hoping my magic fingers would right the wrongs that my arms had caused, but instead I caused more damage.

  The waddling behemoth stopped at the curb, his chubby face now red with unadulterated anger. He looked from me to the car and then back again, seemingly ready to explode.

  “That’s my fucking car!” he bellowed.

  His forehead glistened with perspiration that appeared at an increasing rate, dribbling down his bulbous head like a freshly sprayed apple in a grocer’s window. A vein at the right of his temple throbbed aggressively, on the verge of hemorrhaging and getting me out of a tricky situation.

  “Oh, erm … sorry about that,” I said calmly. I pushed my palms against it absentmindedly, forcing some pressure into it to try again to right the wrong. Somehow I managed to squeeze another indent into the surprisingly malleable hood.

  He threw his palms to his forehead and screamed several obscenities at me. He took a few steps toward me and I took a few back, the effort far greater on his part.

  In my defense, it was a shit fucking car. He did well to afford it, assuming he had actually paid for it, but it was a heap of mangled rust, and a few dents weren’t going to make a difference. I could have told him that. I certainly felt like doing so, but before I could utter a word, I was halted by a familiar sound and an encroaching sense of dread. In the calamity, I had forgotten about the half-witted Darren and his no-witted friends. They had broken free from their cluster, split into a line of four, and were now rushing down the road, heading straight for me.

  The big man was also preparing himself for an attack, his arms held out like an obese and hungry zombie, his chubby fingers grasping the air as if it were made of cake. I sprinted away as fast as I could. A roar followed me, a bellow concocted of adolescent excitement and middle-aged rage.


  “Get the fucker!”

  “Break his fucking legs!”

  “I can’t … continue … running out of …”

  I sped away in no particular direction. There was no safety for me at home, only the comfort of having the shit kicked out of me in the privacy of my own house if they caught me there.

  Out of the tentacled subdivision, across a graveled patch that kicked up flurries of stones behind my heels, the entrance to a park opened up invitingly in front of me and I headed straight for the woodland at its center. I was already breathless, ill prepared for the physical exertion. I didn’t exercise and I rarely ventured outside the house. During gym classes, I found solace in the fact that no one wanted to pick me for any teams and even the teacher was content if I didn’t take part.

  They were gaining on me, clearly faster and fitter than I was. Darren headed the group; his two friends, two people I recognized from the year below, bounded just a few yards behind him. Barry was struggling at the back of the group, probably more upset by his distance from Darren than by his failure to catch me.

  A wall of vegetation blocked my way, but I burst through like a runner scything through the tape at the finishing line. A few thorns sliced and picked at my skin, opening up wounds on my bare arms and piercing through my shirt and into my abdomen.

  I slalomed through a succession of trees, listening with a heavy heart as the riotous group matched and bettered my every stride. The sound of their approach, their catcalls, and their heavy breathing broke through the sound of my own beating heart.

  I hopped over a thicket, but my tired legs struggled and my right foot tangled among a twining of branches. I stumbled and nearly fell, but righted myself and plodded on.

  I tried to detour, to cut right at an angle and throw them off my scent, but they were close enough to see me and follow. I struggled through the greenery, my legs growing tired with each stretch, my breath like razor blades in my chest. I made it to the edge, the light of the boundary and the street beyond—where a dozen alcoves, shops, and alleyways would have aided my plight—before I was crushed under the weight of an athletic dive from Darren Henderson.